So just how bad is the U.S. economy? Well, the truth is that sometimes it is hard to put into words. We have squandered the great wealth left to us by our forefathers, we have almost totally dismantled the world’s greatest manufacturing base, we have shipped millions of good jobs overseas and we have piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of mankind. We have taken the greatest free enterprise economy that was ever created and have turned it into a gigantic house of cards delicately balanced on a never-ending spiral of paper money and debt. For decades, all of this paper money and debt has enabled us to enjoy the greatest party in the history of the world, but now the bills are coming due and the party is nearly over.

In fact, things are already so bad that you can pick almost every number and find a corresponding statistic that shows just how bad the economy is getting.

You doubt it?

Well, check this out….

20 – Gallup’s measure of underemployment hit 20.0% on March 15th. That was up from 19.7% two weeks earlier and 19.5% at the start of the year.

19 - According to RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings were reported on 367,056 properties in the month of March. This was an increase of almost 19 percent from February, and it was the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report back in January 2005.

18 – According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March the national rate of unemployment in the United States was 9.7%, but for Americans younger than 25 it was well above 18 percent.

17 – The FDIC’s list of problem banks recently hit a 17-year high.

16 – During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.

15 – The Spanish government has just approved a 15 billion euro austerity plan.

14 – The U.S. Congress recently approved an increase in the debt cap of the U.S. government to over 14 trillion dollars.

13 – The FDIC is backing 8,000 banks that have a total of $13 trillion in assets with a deposit insurance fund that is basically flat broke. In fact, the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund now has negative 20.7 billion dollars in it, which actually represents a slight improvement from the end of 2009.

12 – The U.S. national debt soared from the $12 trillion mark to the $13 trillion mark in a frighteningly short period of time.

11- It is being reported that a massive network of big banks and financial institutions have been involved in blatant bid-rigging fraud that cost taxpayers across the U.S. billions of dollars. The U.S. Justice Department is charging that financial advisers to municipalities colluded with Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia and 11 other banks in a conspiracy to rig bids on municipal financial instruments.

10 – The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10 percent of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one payment during the January-March time period. That was a record high and up from 9.1 percent a year ago.

9 – The official U.S. unemployment number is 9.9%, although the truth is that many economists consider the true unemployment rate to be much, much higher than that.

8 - The French government says that its deficit will increase to 8 percent of GDP in 2010, but by implementing substantial budget cuts they hope that they can get it to within the European Union’s 3 percent limit by the year 2013.

7 – The biggest banks in the U.S. cut their collective small business lending balance by another $1 billion in November. That drop was the seventh monthly decline in a row.

6 – The six biggest banks in the United States now possess assets equivalent to 60 percent of America’s gross national product.

5 – That is the number of U.S. banks that federal regulators closed on Friday. That brings that total number of banks that have been shut down this year in the United States to a total of 78.

4 – According to a study published by Texas A&M University Press, the four biggest industries in the Gulf of Mexico region are oil, tourism, fishing and shipping. Together, those four industries account for approximately $234 billion in economic activity each year. Now those four industries have been absolutely decimated by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and will probably not fully recover for years, if not decades.

3 – Decent three bedroom homes in the city of Detroit can be bought for $10,000, but no one wants to buy them.

2 - A massive “second wave” of adjustable rate mortgages is scheduled to reset over the next two to three years. If this second wave is anything like the first wave, the U.S. housing market is about to be absolutely crushed.

1 - The bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. But of course many on Wall Street and in the government would argue that there is nothing wrong with an economy where nearly half the people are dividing up 1 percent of the benefits.

Troubling Refusal to DiscloseJames Hansen and Climate Change; NASA’s Disgrace By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, May 31, 2010 Christopher Horner requested information from National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) through Freedom of Information (FOI) and now reports, “We have asked the court to order NASA – which has evaded our Freedom of Information Act requests for three years – to turn over documents related to global warming activities undertaken by federal employees.”

It’s the pattern of blocking seen throughout the official climate science community.

Recently the University of Virginia asked the courts to block requests for information from Attorney General Cuccinelli on the Michael Mann situation. What do they have to hide? We’re talking about scientific claims at the basis of massive global energy and economic policies. The taxpayer funds the work and will be impacted, yet they’re denied access.

Who Is In Control?Public image is a major concern for NASA, so why have they allowed James Hansen, Director of their Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) to act as he has? There is now evidence suggesting the problem has gone on for a long time; “the equation upon which all Global Warming Theory studies are built is inherently flawed.” They then make a most devastating claim, “Worse, however, than the flaw in the equation, is that this fact has remained covered up by NASA from the first Lunar landing until now, nearly 41 years.”

NASA needs to understand weather and climate because it affects the launch orbit and landing of space vehicles. In the early years they produced excellent work like Herman and Goldberg’s 1978 book Sun, Weather and Climate. Early interests somehow changed. “Much of the institute’s early work involved study of planetary atmospheres using data collected by telescopes and space probes, and in time that led to GISS becoming a leading center of atmospheric modeling and of climate change.”Apparently Hansen caused much of the shift as he pushed his political agenda. NASA GISS employee Gavin Schmidt provided support especially by active participation in RealClimate the attack group organized to defend the Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

Many people wondered how much of his work time went to Realclimate activities and how much represented NASA’s positions.

Hansen deflected attention from his activities by claiming he was muzzled for political ends.

His former boss Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA completely discredited this idea. “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – EPW

Hansen knew the situation because in public he presented himself either as Director of GISS or as a private citizen. He’s entitled to his views as a private citizen, but it’s an affront to imply that when speaking to a group on climate his position will not influence public opinion. Of course, his private views will influence his professional views.

Theon made his own views on global warming public after he retired in a communication to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,” His major concern was the models. “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” He made a disturbing comment about the data, which beyond the models is at the very heart of the climate problem. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” Is Theon referring to Hansen when he talks about manipulating data to prove the models? Why didn’t Theon rein in Hansen? He explains the limitations of his position with Hansen. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation,” In the Minority Office report Theon describes Hansen as a “nice, likeable fellow,” but worries “he’s been overcome by his belief—almost religious—that he’s going to save the world.” And that’s the problem.

Either ignorance of climate science or a deliberate attempt to mislead or bothHansen uses his bureaucratic position as Director of NASA GISS, to pursue a political agenda. He inflated the issue of human induced global warming to a global fraud in 1988 testimony before a House and Senate committee when he said; “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now” This shows either ignorance of climate science or a deliberate attempt to mislead or both. The phrasing suggests incorrectly the greenhouse effect is new. There is no evidence, except in the computer models, that it is causing current climate change. He capped this with another unsupportable statement that he was, “99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”

NASA GISS Controls And “Adjusts” DataBesides its focus on modeling and climate change NASA GISS established itself as the source of global temperatures. It’s probably the record Theon refers to in his comment about data because it has consistently been the centre of controversy.

One was discovery of the so-called the Y2K error, which resulted in a significant change in the US temperature record. The claim 1998 was the warmest year on record and 9 of 10 of the warmest years were in that decade was amended to 1934 being the warmest and 4 of the top 10 were in the 1930s.

Emails related to this incident obtained through freedom of information prompted the comment, “Climate activist and arch-druid of the AGW movement James Hansen caught out telling porkies? Now that would be a tragedy for the Climate Fear Promotion industry! “ (Porkies is English slang for lies.)

Each year global annual temperatures are produced by different agencies and every time the NASA GISS data shows a more pronounced warming. “Each time Hansen announces that the GISS has discovered a better way to statistically modify actual US ground temperatures, warming becomes even more pronounced and any cooling less pronounced.”

All adjustments enhance the warming trend to support Theon’s comment that, “some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results.” Even with adjustments model projections overestimate the warming, but then exact replication would raise more suspicions.

“Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him”In the July/August 2008 issue of Launch Magazine NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham wrote, “Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him,”… “NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it’s becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science.”

Actions Speak Louder Than WordsHere are NASA’s own words about transparency. “NASA is expanding transparency, participation, and collaboration and creating a new level of openness and accountability. We are focusing on embedding open government into three integrated aspects of our operations—policy, technology, and culture.”

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Dealby Robert P. Murphy (Regnery, 2009); 272 pages.

Government of all kind depends on elaborate mythologies to keep the people complacent in the face of constant attacks on their liberty, their property, and even their lives. Kings used to proclaim that they were divine or at least that they ruled with divine approval, so disobedience to them was actually disobedience to God or the gods. That worked to keep most of the citizenry in line for a very long time.

As religion started losing its hold over people, rulers came up with new ideas. One was that the state was like a big, sheltering family where everyone had to cooperate for the common good — as directed by the government. Another idea was that the alternative to control by the government, anarchy, was so terrifying that it must be opposed at every turn. Government, according to this notion, is our bulwark against many calamities, including economic implosion. If it weren’t for the benevolent, far-seeing actions of politicians and their hired regulators, we would have to endure repeated and prolonged depressions. So even if you aren’t crazy about everything the government does, you need to accept it because the alternative is so much worse.

The argument that we need the government to stabilize and stimulate the economy came to the forefront during the 1930s and it’s there once again following the bursting of the housing bubble and the stock-market collapse in 2007-08. People who never think the state has too much power are beating the drums and hollering that these events once again prove the need for government to have a tight — tighter — grip on the economic reins. Numerous articles and books have been written on the wisdom we can gain by looking back in history at the Great Depression and President Roosevelt’s New Deal. The message they convey is that laissez-faire capitalism causes depressions and we must rely on activist government for salvation.

Economist Robert Murphy (Ph.D. from New York University, formerly on the faculty of Hillsdale College and now an independent scholar) agrees that we can learn a lot by looking back at the Great Depression and New Deal, but maintains that the lessons to be learned are the exact opposite of those that our political establishment (including its many intellectual hangers-on) want us to learn. Far from proving any defect in capitalism, the Depression actually shows that politicians should refrain from political meddling with the economy, especially federal tampering with money and credit. Also, if we hunt for the truth about the New Deal, we discover that it was just a parade of endless folly and bungling that made things worse.

Murphy puts it this way:

More and more economists and historians are beginning to realize that the corrupt politicians who manage to waste our money today were not wizards of efficiency in the 1930s. Some things remain the same: politicians and bureaucrats have always been incompetent and venal when they’ve chosen to intervene in the economy.

Oh, oh. If that idea were to become widely accepted, support for much of what the federal and state governments do would turn into hostility. That is exactly what Murphy is trying to accomplish with a book that is aimed at the everyday reader, easy to read, and free of jargon. The political scoundrels would love to keep this book out of people’s hands.

The real culprit

Most Americans have been taught that the Depression occurred because capitalists produced too much and underpaid their workers, because greedy speculators produced a stock-market bubble, because the country was stuck with the antiquated and inflexible gold standard, or some combination of those ideas. Murphy adduces strong arguments and evidence to show that those notions are entirely false. The natural stability that comes from millions of market participants acting in accordance with the price system’s signals was thrown out of kilter by Federal Reserve policies in the late 1920s. The Fed engineered artificially low interest rates then, just as it did at the beginning of our recent housing bubble. Artificially low interest rates, Murphy shows, cause people to make bad business investment decisions. That was what precipitated the boom and subsequent crash. Blame government, not capitalism.

And the gold standard? Murphy gives his readers a clear explanation of just how the gold standard worked in favor of overall price stability, economic growth, and trade. The seeds of disaster were planted, he shows, when European governments went off the gold standard to pay for the stupendous costs of World War I with blizzards of paper money. The gold standard was a pillar of economic stability. It was done in by politicians who couldn’t abide its restraints. Herbert Hoover

Americans have also been told that the Depression wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been for Herbert Hoover’s dogged insistence on letting the free market correct itself. But that idea, Murphy demonstrates, is also utterly false. Hoover was thoroughly committed to “progressive” policies he felt would put the economy back on its feet. Especially revealing is Murphy’s recounting of the fact that back in the Harding administration (1921-23) Hoover had argued in favor of government “stimulus” and interventionism. Fortunately, President Harding listened instead to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who argued for federal budget and tax cuts to help speed recovery, but otherwise not to tinker with the economy. Under Mellon’s approach, the economy quickly rebounded from its sharp postwar slump. Hoover, however, remained devoted to his belief that recessions call for more government intervention, not less.

Once the stock market crashed in 1929 and unemployment rose, Hoover (who had been elected president in 1928) rejected the counsel of Mellon and others who urged him to follow the same course Harding had. He was certain that it would be more effective and humane for the federal government to step in and override the slow and “cruel” free-market adjustment process. By embracing an activist approach, Hoover managed to convert what would have been a short recession into America’s worst depression.

Hoover was voted out of office in disgrace in the 1932 election, but to his dying day he remained adamant that his activist, “progressive” economic policy was right.

Franklin Roosevelt

His successor in the White House was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that brings us to another myth, probably the most widespread and pernicious of all, namely that Roosevelt’s New Deal worked to bring the country out of the Depression. On the contrary, Murphy shows, the New Deal was just Hooverism taken to new, often absurd heights, and it merely deepened the country’s economic woes.

For example, Roosevelt and his “Brain Trust” of pro-socialist intellectuals promulgated the policy of forcing farmers to destroy crops at a time when many people were going hungry. Roosevelt, an arrogant and economically illiterate man, had become convinced that high agricultural prices were the key to restoring prosperity. He was wrong, but as usual, it wasn’t the politicians who paid the cost of their blunders. It was “the little guy” they claimed to be protecting from the ravages of capitalism.

Not only did Roosevelt’s New Deal prolong and deepen the Depression, but it also brought something new and ugly to America — bullying government regulators who could ruin ordinary people who just wanted to peacefully go about their business. Murphy’s chapter “The Outrages of the New Deal” should make any reader with an ounce of moral sense angry. Roosevelt’s gold seizure, his bureaucratic attacks on farmers and businessmen, his abuse of legal processes to harass those who dared to disagree with him, and many more instances will have the reader thinking, “Roosevelt was not a great president; he was a despicable failure!”

As an added bonus, Murphy includes a chapter to refute the notion common among conservatives that what truly ended the Depression was not the New Deal, but rather American participation in World War II. He shows that this misconception is rooted in Bastiat’s “broken-window fallacy.” That is, it depends on people’s focusing only on what is apparent (in this case, lower unemployment) and missing what is not apparent (that labor and materials were being devoted to military purposes and therefore were not available to produce goods people wanted to consume). The Depression ended only after the war was over and most economic controls were ended.

This book isn’t just about history. It is extraordinarily pertinent to our current political and economic circumstances. Once again, the federal government’s blundering has gotten the country into a severe recession, and once again Americans have elected a president who believes in the same statist lunacy that Hoover and Roosevelt did. Americans are being told that the only way back to prosperity is to greatly increase the size and scope of government. That was a disaster in the 1930s and it will be a disaster today if Americans fall for the lies that capitalism is the villain and government is their protector.

Thanks to Bob Murphy and Regnery Publishing for their efforts at telling them the truth.

George C. Leef is the director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, North Carolina, and book review editor of The Freeman. Send him email

This article originally appeared in the February 2010 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.

This is a video that I had made in 1997 and is self explanatory.That was my Company, Sustainable Technologies Corp., which is now defunct…see insert info…this material which I developed back then is unique and will save those Coastal Marshes Esturaz and the Shorlines.

Re named AmeriHaz…this material will do just what was claimed in the video.

AL…a friend over here where I live, seen the video, I met and gave her a copy, she then insisted we make this a YouTube Video for all to look at what can be accomplished…if the guv would just get off their dead asses and use this type of material down in the Gulf…It may not clean it all up but will go very far in protecting from further damage the Marshlands and all the Hatcheries areas, Rivers and Streams.

AeroHaz was renamed AmeriHaz….and I would hope some official talks with me about beginning to produce this and get it down there, into the hands and boats of those Fishermen who are watching their entire Livelihoods wash up in Tar Balls.

All we would need is Initiallization money…to produce it and costs of Materials. Temporary workers etc.///and a Special Pass for me to go thru Airports thru the TSA. I'm intolerant to this type of gangsterism and I know I'm on some list…My Battle with the ChemTrails continues! They don't like me very much…know whadda seyin?

Maybe someone will take note and inquire…the contact info has been inserted …Is that Hay werking fer ya?

See the insert contact info….the special addy for this will be AmeriHaz@gmail.com

Remember death panels? They’re baaaaack now that Obamacare is law of the land.

Before Obamacare became the law of the land, liberals and “progressives” went ballistic over Sarah Palin’s Facebook entry stating an obvious fact — Obamacare will realize its savings on relegating seniors to sub-standard health care via rationing. Libs were outraged and said there was no evidence the government plans to implement “death panels.” Palin’s assertion was subsequently deemed “lie of the year.”

That was then, this is now. Earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary (and Bilderberg member) Kathleen Sebelius said Dr. Donald Berwick is “absolutely the right leader at this time” to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Obamacare will cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare over the next decade as the Boomers retire and enter old age.

Berwick is the right man for the job. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open,” Berwick said while discussing the council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, which was tasked with researching and evaluating the cost of medical treatments and their outcomes. It was part of the $787 billion stimulus package and one of the building blocks Obama wanted in place before the health-care takeover bill was passed, writes Jane Chastain.

During debate on Obamacare, mechanisms for rationing embedded in the legislation were revealed — the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Independent Medicare Advisory board, the CMS Innovation Center and the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force — but few in the corporate media paid attention. Most of them were too busy attacking criticism of the bill.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

“I’m really pleased that the President nominated Dr. Donald Berwick,” Sebelius gushed. “He’s known nationally as an enormously competent physician and an enormously passionate health care provider and someone who, I think, is incredibly well suited to help increase the quality of health care delivered to the 40-plus million Americans who rely on Medicare services and also the 30-plus million on Medicaid services.”

Dr. Berwick is enamored with the British healthcare system that “uses end-of-life death pathways, which withhold expensive treatment in favor of morphine and hand-holding. Physicians have charged that this leads to premature death for many British citizens,” according to Chastain.

“During the debate on the health-care takeover bill, Obama ridiculed those like [Senator] Roberts who tried to warn us about rationing and Sarah Palin who used the term ‘death panels.’ Now that his administration has admitted that rationing is part of the plan, at the very least, he owes these folks an apology,” writes Chastain.

Apologize? Go fish. No apology will be forthcoming. Our eugenicist rulers are determined to eventually reduce the global population to around 500 million people who will be reduced to robotized slaves. Obama’s deathcare operation is one small step in this direction.

It is no secret the primary goals of the Bilderberg Group are a one-world government, a one-world monetary system and a vast reduction in world population. In 2009, the “billionaires club” — Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, George Soros and Michael Bloomberg — gathered in New York to discuss the “disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat” your continued existence poses to the global elite. Gates and Buffett in particular have donated huge sums of money for population control.

For the global elite and their minions, we are contemptible useless eaters. “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg admitted last year.

The elite believe they can maintain the facade of a Constitution and Bill of Rights as they go about decimating world population. Obama’s science czar, John P. Holdren, said as much when he wrote in EcoScience (page 837): “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Gates and Buffett have announced the “crisis” of world population is “sufficiently severe to endanger the society” of global elite.

It is no mistake a Bilderberg member is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It is also no mistake Obamacare was passed and will be implemented at the precise moment millions of Baby Boomers enter retirement and old age.

Millions of Boomers — who dutifully paid their taxes including taxes for Medicare — will suffer the fate of Edward G. Robinson in the 1973 film Soylent Green:

The Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP) received the Healthcare Personnel Campaign award for immunization excellence by the National Influenza Vaccine Summit (NIVS).

The awards presented during the NIVS Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, May 18, recognized “the value and extraordinary contributions of individuals and organizations towards improved adult, and/or childhood influenza vaccination rates within their communities during the 2009-2010 influenza season,” according to a NIVS news release.CHOP raised the influenza vaccination rate among targeted staff from 91% for the previous year to 99.6% when it instituted a mandatory flu shot policy for the 2009-2010 influenza season. Engaging staff through education, collaboration, and data sharing and emphasizing patient safety over optional self-protection was the key to success, according to CHOP.

Some of the tactics that CHOP, a large healthcare system with an in-patient campus and more than 40 ambulatory sites used included:

•Outreach targeted to areas where vaccination rates were low in past years•Peer-to-peer engagement•Web-based education•Use of a multi-disciplinary flu planning committee•A kick-off-event that vaccinated more than 1,000 employees in four hours•Weekly reports to managers and administrative leadersHonorable mention in the Healthcare Personnel Campaign went to University of Texas (UT) M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which also saw increased rates after instituting a mandatory vaccination policy.

If your healthcare facility is considering instituting or amending a mandatory flu shot policy, check out the HCPro webcast below.

Navigating the sticky issues around mandatory flu shots Seasonal and H1N1 influenza have prompted many healthcare facilities to consider mandatory influenza immunization for employees. The reaction from employees has been unmistakably vocal, as issues of patient safety and workers’ rights clash. Join HCPro for Mandatory Influenza Vaccinations: Get Healthcare Staff Onboard at Your Facility on Wednesday, July 14, at 1 p.m. (Eastern) for a 90-minute webcast that will provide you with the medical and legal perspectives for developing a mandatory influenza immunization policy.

By Thomas Sowell · Tuesday, May 11, 2010One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have "a duty to die," rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly.

There was a time-- fortunately, now long past-- when some desperately poor societies had to abandon old people to their fate, because there was just not enough margin for everyone to survive. Sometimes the elderly themselves would simply go off from their family and community to face their fate alone.

But is that where we are today?

Talk about "a duty to die" made me think back to my early childhood in the South, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. One day, I was told that an older lady-- a relative of ours-- was going to come and stay with us for a while, and I was told how to be polite and considerate towards her.

She was called "Aunt Nance Ann," but I don't know what her official name was or what her actual biological relationship to us was. Aunt Nance Ann had no home of her own. But she moved around from relative to relative, not spending enough time in any one home to be a real burden.

At that time, we didn't have things like electricity or central heating or hot running water. But we had a roof over our heads and food on the table-- and Aunt Nance Ann was welcome to both.

Poor as we were, I never heard anybody say, or even intimate, that Aunt Nance Ann had "a duty to die."

I only began to hear that kind of talk decades later, from highly educated people in an affluent age, when even most families living below the official poverty level owned a car or truck and had air-conditioning.

It is today, in an age when homes have flat-panelled TVs, and most families eat in restaurants regularly or have pizzas and other meals delivered to their homes, that the elites-- rather than the masses-- have begun talking about "a duty to die."

Back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann, nobody in our family had ever gone to college. Indeed, none had gone beyond elementary school. Apparently you need a lot of expensive education, sometimes including courses on ethics, before you can start talking about "a duty to die."

Many years later, while going through a divorce, I told a friend that I was considering contesting child custody. She immediately urged me not to do it. Why? Because raising a child would interfere with my career.

But my son didn't have a career. He was just a child who needed someone who understood him. I ended up with custody of my son and, although he was not a demanding child, raising him could not help impeding my career a little. But do you just abandon a child when it is inconvenient to raise him?

The lady who gave me this advice had a degree from the Harvard Law School. She had more years of education than my whole family had, back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann.

Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which "a duty to die" is just one.

These efforts at changing values used to be called "values clarification," though the name has had to be changed repeatedly over the years, as more and more parents caught on to what was going on and objected. The values that supposedly needed "clarification" had been clear enough to last for generations and nobody asked the schools and colleges for this "clarification."

A friend said “bring a creative broccoli dish for dinner, how is that for a challenge?” So I whipped up a salad marinade with herbs from the garden, to pour over the steamed/cooled broccoli. It turned out pretty tasty, so I thought I would share this with you—here it is. Working with herbs fresh from the garden is just so darned fun, it just “shows to go you” how enjoyable it can be to garden at home. I must qualify that I almost never measure when I am cooking, preferring to creatively play in the kitchen rather than be boxed in by a recipe. So I can only estimate the proportions of the herbs I used. I hope you enjoy. Best wishes, Drina

Background flavor: oregano, basil, fresh chopped (about 1/2 tsp each, to taste)Mix all together, and add to freshly steamed/cooled veggies (mixed or solo, as you wish)…broccoli, green beans, cauliflower, zucchini, with colorful cherry tomatoes or pearl onions ad lib. Marinate for at least four hours. The result should taste like a lemony/lemon balm flavor with the nippy “zip” from watercress, backed by the cooling sparkle of fresh mint, and other herbs as background flavor. Enjoy!

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Europe faces a major overhaul in the way it deals with genetically modified (GM) crops, after the European Commission sparked controversy with new plans to circumvent its cumbersome legislative review process.

The EU executive wants to let national governments decide whether or not to grow genetically modified crops without a long drawn-out review of the bloc's current GM legislation, an initial impact assessment seen by Reuters showed.

Details of the plan, which would open the door to widespread GM cultivation in Europe, provoked a furious reaction from environmentalists already angry at the EU executive's decision to approve the commercial growing of a GM potato in March.

But the plan will be a boost to biotech companies in the EU, where blockages in the current approval system have confined commercial growing to less than 100,000 hectares across the 27-nation bloc.

It could also ease trade tensions between the EU and the United States, which launched a World Trade Organization dispute against the EU in 2003 after countries including Austria and Germany banned the cultivation of an approved GM maize.

The EU executive is hoping to unblock the paralysis in GM crop approvals by giving those countries that want to grow them the freedom to do so, while also sanctioning the current "GM-free" stance of several member states.

Rather than revise the legislation, which would require the agreement of the European Parliament, the Commission will try to make the change "within the existing legislative framework, if possible," the paper said.

"The Commission appears intent on avoiding any democratic debate with the parliament in order to please the biotech industry and get GM crops into Europe," said Friends of the Earth campaigner Adrian Bebb.

The proposals -- due to be tabled in June -- will likely have "a positive impact on biotechnology and seed companies compared to the status quo," the assessment said.

"There may be a negative impact for non-GM farmers," it added, referring to the risk of unintentional contamination of conventional farm produce by GM-crops.

POLICY OPTIONS

The paper outlines several options for implementing the proposal within the existing legislative framework, and makes it clear that a key consideration will be the likely reaction of WTO countries, particularly the U.S.

"Biotechnology is an important topic of transatlantic dialogue and therefore relations with the U.S. ... need to be taken into consideration when developing this initiative, irrespective of the options," the assessment said.

The first and most likely option set out in the paper is that approval for GM cultivation requests would continue to be granted at EU level following a safety assessment, but countries would then decide individually whether to grow them or not.

When it comes to how member states will justify their decision whether or not to cultivate, one option is to revise non-legislative EU guidelines on the "co-existence" of GM and non-GM crops, according to the paper.

This would allow countries to specify a 5 or 10 kilometer "buffer zone" between GM and non-GM fields, which would effectively make cultivation of GM crops impossible in practice.

Another option in the paper is to allow countries to cite "socio-economic" factors as the basis for their decisions, such as protecting organic production, increasing farmers' yields, or reducing the use of herbicides and pesticides

Veteran Bilderberg researcher and bestselling author Daniel Estulin The Corbett Report has once again acquired a copy of the agenda for the annual meeting of the world’s power elite. In an exclusive interview with earlier today, Estulin revealed what the Bilderbergers will be discussing at this year’s confab in Sitges, Spain on June 3-6, 2010.Download an mp3 of the interview by clicking here or listen in the player below:

According to the documents—which Estulin obtained from his sources inside the secretive group—issues to be discussed in this year’s formal deliberations are:

1. Will the Euro Survive?2. Development in Europe: Europe’s Exit Strategy…On Hold?3. Do We Have Institutions to Deal With the World Economy?4. Greece: Lessons and Forward-looking Strategies5. NATO and Afghanistan: The Practical Agenda for the Alliance6. Iran and Russia: Economic and Financial Threats to the Alliance7. The Consequences of War Against Terrorism8. The Influence of Domestic Issues on American Foreign Policy9.The Outlook for Japan’s Economy10. The Future of the U.S. Dollar: Alternative Scenarios

That the Bilderbergers—essentially a talking shop for European and North American power players—are interested in discussing the current meltdown of the European economy should come as no surprise, especially as the group’s attendee list includes many of the key financiers and string pullers who helped steer Europe into the crisis in the first place. Past attendees of the meeting include current EU President Herman Van Rompuy who got the job as the first non-elected head of the undemocratic European Union after a special wine and dine session with Bilderberg steering committee members. Last year he heralded the beginning of global government, praising the increased role of G20 in dealing with the global financial crisis. Other key Bilderbergers include Jean-Claude Trichet, who, as head of the European Central Bank, was instrumental in helping to craft the current European bailout which itself is designed to incentivize the bankruptcy of Europe. Trichet, too, also recently called for global government to regulate the world economic meltdown that his fellow Bilderbergers helped to create.

Those familiar with the Bilderberg group’s long-cherished dream of achieving global government through the creation of an international financial framework will be unsurprised to see that a debate on the question “Do We Have Institutions to Deal With the World Economy?” is the third order of business at this year’s meeting. Nor will it be a surprise when the question is inevitably answered with the standard globalist line that international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank need to be “strengthened” and even given enhanced regulatory powers as a result of the crisis they have brought about, exactly as Bilderberg observers have been predictingShadow Masters, former U.S. Undersecretary of State George Ball expressed the ambition of the globalists in an address to the 1968 Bilderberg meeting in Mont Tremblant when he stated that they were interested in developing a “world company” to take over the “archaic political structure of nation states”for years. Indeed, as Estulin himself notes in his latest book,

Other items on the agenda are exactly in line with the issues and plans made at last year’s Bilderberg and those ideas debated at last year’s G20 Finance Ministers meeting, both of which Estulin was able to infiltrate with his inside sources. The fact that the Iran-Russia alliance is on this year’s agenda is doubly telling, not only because a strike against Iran was on the table at this year’s Trilateral Commission meeting, but because, as Estulin notes in today’s interview, it indicates that the real object of the Bilderbergers’ aggression against Iran is the destabilization of Russia, a country that has traditionally been a thorn in the side of the globalists.

Perhaps the only thing that is surprising about this year’s leaked agenda is that the secretive group, which has gone to great length to conceal itself from media and public scrutiny, has failed to take precautions to prevent Estulin and his sources from acquiring the information yet again. “I’m a little bit disappointed in the Bilderbergers,” he said on the line from Spain, where he currently resides. “I would think they would have taken certain precautions and measures, especially coming to my part of the world.”

While the agenda is only a guide for the larger group discussions and the real decision-making takes place among the core members of the group behind closed doors, it does serve as an indicator of the issues and events that are preoccupying the globalists at this sensitive stage of their operation, just as they begin to realize their dream of instituting global government by manufacturing a global depression. Even as these plans begin to come to fruition, the people of Iceland, Greece, and other developed countries are beginning to rise up en masse to throw off the yoke of financial oppression and key Bilderbergers are openly talking of their fears of a global political awakening.

This year’s conference marks a new level of exposure and opposition to the Bilderberg group itself. Daniel Estulin will be making an historic speech to the European parliament on June 1st along with Mario Borghezio, Nigel Farage, and other key MEPs. Then Charlie Skelton, reporting once again for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, will be taking part in a mass counter-conference where those opposed to the Bilderbergers and their secret proceedings will gather to draw attention to the group.

Stay tuned to corbettreport.com for all of the latest information on this year’s conference, including an update from Estulin about what his sources are able to reveal about the meeting’s proceedings. Coverage starts this Sunday with the release of Episode 131 of The Corbett Report podcast, “Bilderberg 2010.”

Trilateral Commission co-founder says infighting amongst elite, combined with awakening of humanity worldwide, is hampering move towards one world government

Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comWednesday, May 19, 2010

At a recent Council on Foreign Relations speech in Montreal, co-founder with David Rockefeller of the Trilateral Commission and regular Bilderberg attendee Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that a “global political awakening,” in combination with infighting amongst the elite, was threatening to derail the move towards a one world government.

Brzezinski explained that global political leadership had become “much more diversified unlike what it was until relatively recently,” noting the rise of China as a geopolitical power, and that global leadership in the context of the G20 was “lacking internal unity with many of its members in bilateral antagonisms.”

In other words, the global elite is infighting amongst itself and this is hampering efforts to rescue the agenda for global government, which seems to be failing on almost every front.

Brzezinski then explained another significant factor in that, “For the first time in all of human history mankind is politically awakened – that’s a total new reality – it has not been so for most of human history.”

Watch the clip.

Brzezinski continued, “The whole world has become politically awakened,” adding that all over the world people were aware of what was happening politically and were “consciously aware of global inequities, inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation.”

“Mankind is now politically awakened and stirring,” said Brzezinski, adding that this in combination with a fractured elite “makes it a much more difficult context for any major power, including currently the leading world power, the United States.”

During a subsequent question and answer session, Brzezinski was asked if he thought another organization should replace the United Nations as the de facto “one world government,” to which Brzezinski responded, “There should be such an organization,” before pointing out that the UN was not it in its current role.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

As the text at the end of the video makes clear, Brzezinski’s admission that humanity has undergone a political awakening is not a positive development in the eyes of the elite.

In his 1970 book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, Brzezinski wrote the following.

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

The “elite” to which Brzezinski refers included many of those who were in attendance for his speech at the CFR meeting. The global political awakening which Brzezinski discussed represents part of the resistance to that very elite dominated society and the systems of control, subjugation and surveillance that they have imposed upon the human race in pursuit of a “more controlled society” and a one world government.

Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. government built a fleet of cars that were safer than anything on the road. Twenty-five years ago, the government shredded them in secret. Two escaped the crusher. This is their story.

As Congress and the auto industry wrestle with another round of tougher safety standards, nothing on the menu comes close to setting up the federal government’s own vehicle design business. Yet that’s exactly what Congress did in 1966.

With the furor from Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed still fresh, the original act creating the Department of Transportation also ordered it to build its own experimental vehicles for testing new safety devices, and swap notes with 13 other countries. The young faces at the new agency farmed out the first set to three companies, including General Motors.

The result: Three swamp-monster sedans of more than 5000 pounds apiece that did double-duty as safe transportation and appetite suppressants. The October 1972 issue of Popular Mechanics laid out the details: Roof-mounted periscopes; bumpers wide enough to haul Dom Deluise; and in the GM model, a rear-seat “credenza,” so back-seat passengers would be protected in crashes by smacking into a vinyl-covered bosom.

Unsatisfied with the vault-on-wheels solution, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration changed course. It held a bake-off in 1975 for what a safe car in 1985 might look like. Ford and Volkswagen offered ideas, but NHTSA awarded what would become a $30 million contract to two independent engineering firms, Calspan and Minicars.

While Calspan modified French-built Simcas donated by Chrysler, Minicars designed a new model from scratch, aiming to build a four-passenger small car that could protect all its occupants in a 50-mph crash from either the front or side while burning as little fuel as possible. The result looked like an AMC Pacer worked over by the set designers of Battlestar Galactica.

For a piece of American-built iron from the depths of the Carter administration, the 14 Minicar Research Safety Vehicles had a massive amount of technology. The fender and front fascia were plastic composites that could take a 10-mph smack unscathed. Under the plastic body of the most advanced version were run-flat tires, anti-lock brakes with crash-sensing radar and dual-stage airbags. The front seats were attached to the roof with a see-through plastic shield, so they wouldn’t collapse in a rear-end collision.

Power came via four-cylinder engines pilfered from 1977 Honda Accords, mounted in a mid-rear layout driving the back wheels through a 5-speed automated manual transmission. Test drives scored about 32 miles to the gallon, but test crashes suggested passengers might walk away from most crashes up to 50 mph with minimal injuries. NHTSA officials claimed thousands of lives a year could be saved if Minicar tech became standard.

And of course it had gullwing doors. Don Friedman, who managed the project for Minicars, said the idea was simply to look as stylish as the concept being cast around the same time by John DeLorean.

By 1979, NHTSA decided to convince U.S. automakers that safety could be sold as effectively as CB radios and Corinthian leathers, putting the Minicar RSV up at auto shows and county fairs to make the point. Ben Kelley, then working as the research director for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, decided to make a public service announcement for the effort, and convinced Lorne Greene to donate a day in his best white suit:

The Minicar was far from showroom ready. Gullwing doors of the 1970s were as reliable as Billy Carter the week before St. Patrick’s Day. And for all its safety kit, the Minicar lacked one standard: front seat belts.

Airbags weren’t new technology, but Detroit automakers were resisting using them in all but the largest or most luxurious models. NHTSA and the RSV teams wanted to show how well their advanced bags could work in small cars, especially if the riders weren’t belted. Friedman noted that only 13% of Americans were using seat belts in 1980, and that wasn’t expected to change much before 1985.

Armed with data from 59 RSVs from Minicars and Calspan/Chrysler, NHTSA chief Joan Claybrook was ready to press on in 1980 with a new generation of safety vehicles, setting a target of a 2000-lb. car that could seat four and pass a battery of 40-mph crash tests.

All that ended in January 1981, when the “Morning in America” team from the Reagan administration halted the RSV work and promptly fracked the Lorne Greene promos. Two years later, Kelley would tell Congress that by safety standards all new U.S. vehicles were “obsolete the moment they roll off the assembly line.” Thanks to Americans’ general dislike of buckling up, the government’s experts were forecasting 70,000 auto deaths a year by 1990.

The few remaining safety cars moldered away in the Department of Transportation’s basement until 1990, when safety advocates such as Clarence Ditlow and the then-Republican controlled agency began a long-running feud over whether tougher fuel economy rules would lead to more deaths from smaller vehicles. After exploring whether the Smithsonian wanted any of the RSV cars (they did), NHTSA revealed under a Freedom of Information Act query that it had quietly sent all remaining cars to be destroyed. On July 1, 1991, the RSV showcar was crashed into a barrier at 50 mph with no dummies inside, and its airbags shut off.

Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who’d overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books.

“Junking those cars was a terrible idea,” said Kelley, who now teaches at Tufts medical school. “What is the benefit of keeping anything that’s historically important? The future wants to know more about the past, and when you destroy the past, you destroy the future’s access to knowing about it.”

“I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,” said Friedman.

What the government didn’t know was that it had lost count.

When the Reagan crew shuttered the RSV program in 1981, Minicars still had two cars in its shop; one mostly built, the other without an engine. Over the years, the cars were stored and ignored until a California man named Frank Richardson bought them in 1996 from an asset sale he used to set up his own crash-test business.

Last year, Richardson and Friedman revealed to NHTSA that the Minicars still existed, and the agency paid for a refurbish. The one intact Minicar needs a water pump, but otherwise runs.

“If somebody wanted to buy them, the price would be very high,” Richardson said.

Like other American inventions such as the VCR, the lithium-ion battery and David Hasselhoff, many of the RSV’s technologies only prospered overseas. Anti-lock brakes and air bags were standard on European cars first; Japanese automakers put the first crash-sensing brake system on the market in 2003, nearly 25 years after the RSV sported it. Yet those five-star ratings from NHTSA that have become standard for front crash safety in U.S. cars come from tests at 35 mph, still 15 mph shy of the RSV bar.

Last year, traffic deaths fell to their lowest level since 1961 at 33,963, after remaining stuck at roughly 40,000 for decades, in part because a modern car has more in common with the RSVs than ever before. With smaller cars, tougher fuel rules and bigger worries about oil on the horizon, that 1985 target date for the program may have been set about 30 years too early.

“I don’t think that RSV had much influence in its time,” says Friedman. “It is a precursor of the performance we’re going to see in the future.”

May 28, 2010Discuss HAARP, Chemtrails, and Global Warming This Sunday!Posted by Barbara Peterson under Agenda 21, Survival, environment, health, war on small farmers | Tags: chemtrails, global warming, haarp | [2] Comments Chemtrails are bad news. They contain barium and aluminum, which have the potential to destroy ecosystems around the world. But what if this destruction is merely an inevitable and acceptable consequence of a much larger program? A program intended to be part of an all-in-one solution to global control and manipulation?

Join us on the Dave Hodges show this Sunday at 9:00pm Central time to join in on the discussion. Here is the information:

The Common Sense Show airing on The Republic Broadcasting NetworkSundays 9-11pm CST

Kyrgyzstan as a Geopolitical Pivot in Great Power RivalriesWashington, Moscow, Beijing and the Geopolitics of Central Asia

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19327

by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, May 25, 2010

Part I: Kyrgyzstan as a Geopolitical Pivot

The remote Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan is what Britain’s Halford Mackinder might call a geopolitical ‘pivot’—a land that, owing to its geographical characteristics, holds a pivotal position in Great Power rivalries.

Today the tiny remote country is being shaken by what appears to be an extremely well-planned popular uprising to topple US-backed president Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Preliminary analysts suggested that Moscow had more than a passing interest in promoting regime change there and that the events unfolding might be Moscow’s attempt to stage its own ‘reverse’ version of Washington’s ‘Color Revolutions’ -- Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003 or Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, as well as the 2005 Tulip Revolution that brought the pro-US Bakiyev to power. In the midst of this ongoing power shift in Kyrgyzstan, however, who is doing what to whom, is far from clear.

At the very least, what is playing out has huge strategic implications for military security throughout the Eurasian Heartland -- from China to Russia and beyond. It therefore has staggering implications for the future of the United States in Afghanistan and Central Asia and by extension in all Eurasia.

Political tinderbox

The protests again the US-backed Bakiyev began in March over allegations of extreme corruption on the part of the President and his family members. In 2009, Bakiyev began amending an article in the country’s constitution regulating presidential succession in case of death or unexpected resignation, a move widely seen as an attempt to introduce a "dynastical system" of power transfer in the country, one factor which fuelled the recent nationwide protests in Kyrgyzstan. He placed his son and other relatives in key posts where they raked in huge sums for the US airbase rights at Manas – reportedly as much as $80 million a year -- and other enterprises. [1]

Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia with more than 40% living below the official poverty line. Bakiyev named his son, Maxim -- who also managed to find time and funds to buy part ownership of a UK football club -- to be head of the country’s Central Agency for Development, Investment and Innovation, where he gained control over the country’s richest assets, including the Kumtor gold mine.[2]

Late in 2009 Bakiyev sharply hiked taxes on small and medium businesses and early this year imposed new taxes on telecoms. He privatized the country’s largest electricity company and in January the private company, rumored to have been sold to friends of the family for less than 3% of its estimated worth, doubled electricity prices. The price of heating gas was raised by up to 1000%. Kyrgyzstan’s winters are extremely cold.

The opposition charged that Maxim Bakiyev had arranged a sweetheart privatisation of the state telecom to a friend domiciled in an offshore company in the Canary Islands. In short, popular rage against Bakiyev and company existed for good reason. The key issue was how efficiently that rage was channelled and by whom.

The protests erupted following the decision by the government in March to dramatically raise prices of energy and telecommunications by fourfold and more, in an extremely poor country. During early March protests, Otunbayeva was named spokesperson for a united front of all opposition groups. She appealed at that time to the US government to take a more active interest in Kyrgyzstan’s Bakiyev regime and its lack of democratic standards, obviously with no result.[3]

According to informed Russian sources, at that point Roza Otunbayeva spoke with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to discuss the deteriorating situation. Immediately on its formation of an Interim Government under Otunbayeva, Moscow was the first to recognize the acting government and made an offer of $300 million in immediate stabilization aid, transferring a portion of a 2009 Russian loan of $2.15 billion that was promised Bakiyev’s regime for construction of a hydropower plant on the Naryn river.

The $2.15 billion was originally announced just after Bakiyev declared he would close the US base at Manas, a decision that American dollars managed to reverse some weeks later. Clearly in Moscow’s eyes, the Russian aid and Bakiyev’s announced closing of the US base at Manas were linked.

The latest $300 million tranche of the pledged $2.15 billion from Moscow, re-opened after the ouster of Bakiyev, will reportedly go directly to the Kyrgyz National Bank.[4]

According to a report in Moscow’s RIA Novosti, ousted Prime Minister, Daniyar Usenov, told Russia’s ambassador in Bishkek that Russian media outlets, which enjoy a major influence within the former Soviet state—whose official language is still Russian—had been biased against the Bakiyev-Usenov government. [5]

Bakiyev government security forces, reportedly including Special Forces sharpshooters on rooftops, killed some 81 opposition demonstrators, leading to a dramatic escalation of the protests in the first week of April.

What is remarkable about the events and suggests that there is more going on behind the curtains, is the fact that the full-blown popular uprising exploded onto the scene with little pre-warning in the international media.

There had been protest demonstrations repeatedly since Bakiyev took control in the Washington-financed 2005 Tulip Revolution. [6] That Washington-financed regime change of 2005 had involved the usual list of US NGO’s including Freedom House, The Albert Einstein Institution, The National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.[7] None of the previous protests until this April, however, had the obvious thoroughness and sophistication of the latest one. Events seem to have caught everyone by surprise, not the least the corrupt Bakiyev family and his Washington backers.

The smoothness with which allegiance of the army, police and border security was gained within the first hours of protest suggests very sophisticated pre-planning and masterful coordination. Not clear at this point is whether that came from operative s from abroad, and if so, whether from Russia’s FSB or CIA or whomever.

On April 7, as Bakiyev was losing control, he reportedly rushed to the Americans, but as they saw the blood on the streets caused by Bakiyev’s sharpshooters and the growing fury of the crowds against the government, they reportedly whisked the President and his family to his hometown of Osh, apparently hoping to bring him back after events had calmed.[8] That never happened.

Following the resignation of his entire government, including the heads of the army and national police and border guard, Bakiyev resigned on April 16 and fled to neighboring Kazakhstan. At latest report he is holed up in Belarus, having reportedly gained entry by bringing with him over $200 million for cash-strapped Belarus President Lukashenko.[9]

Kyrgyzstan’s new, interim opposition government, under the nominal leadership of former Foreign Minister Roza Otunbayeva, has declared it wants to set up an international investigation into alleged crimes committed by Bakiyev. Criminal charges have already been filed against him, his sons and brother and other relatives.

Bakiyev had little choice but to flee. The army and police had already sided with the Otunbayeva opposition days before he fled, in an indication that the events were at the very least extremely well planned by at least some parts of the opposition.

A geographical pivot

Kyrgyzstan today plays the role of a geographical pivot. The land-locked country shares a border with China’s Xinjiang Province, a highly strategic point for Beijing. One of the smallest of the Central Asian states, it is also bordered to its north by oil-rich Kazakhstan, on the West by Uzbekistan and on the South by Tajikistan. Moreover, Kyrgyzstan overlaps the politically explosive resource-rich area known as the Ferghana Valley, a multinational ethnic and political friction zone located also in Uzbekistan and Tajikstan.

Image source: US Central Intelligence Agency

The country itself is highly mountainous, with the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains taking some 65% of all land area. Approximately 90% of the country is more than 1500 meters above sea level.

In terms of natural resources -- other than agriculture ,which comprises a third of GDP – Kyrgyzstan has gold, uranium, coal and oil. In 1997 the Kumtor Gold Mine opened one of the largest gold deposits in the world.

Until recently the state agency, Kyrgyzaltyn, owned all the mines and operated many of them as joint ventures with foreign companies. The Kumtor Gold Mine, near the border of China, is 100% owned by Canada’s Centerra Gold Inc. Until the ouster of President Bakiyev, his son, Maxim, head of the State Development Fund, ran Kyrgyzaltyn which is also the largest shareholder of Centerra Gold, the Canadian company that today owns Kumtor.

Significantly, even though he has not been formally elected by Kyrgz voters, Centerra in Toronto, perhaps with a nudge from the US State Department, has already announced it has named Maxim Bakiyev’s “replacement,” as head of Kyrgyzaltyn, Aleksei Eliseev, Deputy Director of the Kyrgyz State Development Agency, to the Board of Directors of Centerra.[10]

Kyrgyzstan also has significant reserves of uranium and antimony. Kyrgyzstan also has considerable remaining deposits of coal of an estimated at 2.5 billion tons, especially in the Kara–Keche deposit in northern Kyrgyzstan.

However, even more pivotal than the mineral riches is the major US Air Force base at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, opened within three months of the US declaration of a global ‘War on Terror’ in September 2001. Shortly thereafter, Russia established its own military airbase not far from Manas. Kyrgyzstan today is the only country that hosts both Russian and American military bases, an uneasy state of affairs to put it mildly.

In sum, Kyrgyzstan, sitting in the center of the world’s most strategic landmass, Central Asia, is a geopolitical prize coveted by many.

Washington walks on political eggshells

The US State Department had tried to get Bakiyev to hold on in apparent hopes they could disperse the protestors, quell the street riots and keep their Tulip man in power. Hillary Clinton initially called on the Parliamentary opposition – government ministers who objected to Bakiyev’s corruption and nepotism -- to “negotiate” and “develop a dialogue” with the US-financed Basiyev Presidency. The State Department then issued statements that the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was still functioning, despite reports that his entire administration had resigned.[11]

On April 7, during the peak of the drama when the outcome was still unclear, US Assistant Secretary of State P. J. Crowley told reporters, “We want to see Kyrgyzstan evolve, just as we do other countries in…the region. But, that said, there is a sitting government. We work closely with that government. We are allied with that government in terms of its support, you know, for international operations in…Afghanistan.” [12] George Orwell would have admired the exercise in diplomatic doublespeak.

On April 15, when it was clear Bakiyev had little support within the country, the US State Department declared that it will side with neither the country's ousted president nor the Parliamentary opposition. In a statement indicating Washington is walking on eggshells hoping not to crack any, especially affecting its Manas airbase rights, State Department spokesman Phillip Crowley declared, “We want to see the situation resolved peacefully. And we're not taking sides.”[13] Since then, after talks with Foreign Minister Otunbayeva and her associates, the State Department and Obama have warmly backed the new political reality.

Otunbayeva, a leading Communist Party member during the Soviet days, had served as the first Kyrgyz ambassador to the United States in the post-Soviet era, and later as a special assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The interim government headed by Otunbayeva says they are going to write a new constitution within six months and prepare for a democratic election in the country. The opposition claims to be in control of the situation in Kyrgyztan though riots and looting outside Bishkek are still being reported.[14]

Whose coup?

While there is much speculation about an on-the-ground role by Russian intelligence in the ‘anti-tulip revolution,’ we must leave that as an open question.

In comments during his Washington visit on April 14, a week into the upheaval, Russia’s Medvedev expressed concern about the stability of the country: “The risk of Kyrgyzstan's breakdown into two parts - north and south - really exists. This is why our task is to help our Kyrgyz partners to find the mildest way out of this situation." He outlined a worst-case scenario where an unstable Kyrgyz government could be left powerless as extremists flood into the country, creating a second Afghanistan.[15]

US White House Adviser on Russia, Michael McFaul, speaking from the Prague arms control talks, referring to the unfolding events in Kyrgyzstan, stated, “This is not some anti-American coup. That we know for sure; and this is not a sponsored-by-the-Russians coup.” [16]

At least nominally, Washington might well have reason to believe they can “work” with the new Interim Kyrgyz leaders.

Roza Otunbayeva is well known in Washington since she served there as Ambassador during the 1990’s.

Her Number Two in the Interim Government, former Parliament Speaker and a key figure in Washington’s 2005 Tulip Revolution that brought Bakiyev to power, Omurbek Tekebayev, was brought to Washington back then by the State Department for one of their “visitors programs” -- where emerging foreign political figures are presumably taught the beauties of the American way of life.

Tekebayev spoke openly at the time of that experience: “I found that the Americans know how to choose people, know how to make an accurate evaluation of what is happening and prognosticate the future development and political changes.” [17]

Thus there is evidence that the latest events in Kyrgyzstan could have been backed by Moscow as a “reverse” Color Revolution, one executed to control growing US military presence in Central Asia. And there is evidence it may also have been a second US-backed regime change, perhaps after the Obama Administration became alarmed that its man, Bakiyev, was getting too economically close to Beijing. The third and least likely version is that the events were executed by a rag-tag disorganized domestic opposition that never before managed to rally more than a few thousands to the streets to protest Bakiyev policies in the past five years.

Clear at this point is that both Moscow and Washington are going to considerable lengths to show some minimal unity on the emerging events in the country.

Kanat Saudabayev, head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), on April 15 said the safe exit of Kyrgyzstan President Bakiyev from Kyrgyzstan was the result of joint efforts by Obama and Russian President Medvedev. [18]

Clearly both Washington and Moscow eagerly want to have a strong presence in whatever government emerges from the strife-torn Central Asian country of five million people. What is less well known but equally clear, is the vital stake China has in stable relations with Kyrgyzstan, a neighbor with whom it shares a long border. Most interesting from here is where events will go in the forlorn but geopolitically strategic country.

Manas Airbase future?

One of the most pressing questions for Washington is the future of the vital US airbase at Manas near the capitol, Bishkek. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressed the “important role Kyrgyzstan plays in hosting the Transit Center at the Manas Airport,” according to an official State Department statement of April 11. She left little doubt what Washington’s priority is in the country. It’s not democracy nor is it economic development.[19]

Following the Washington declaration of the War on Terror in September 2001, the Pentagon got basing rights in several strategic Central Asian countries, ostensibly to help wage the war against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. In addition to basing rights in Uzbekistan, Washington got the Manas concession in Kyrgyzstan as well.

Most extensive of course has been the US military presence in Afghanistan. In one of his first acts as President, Obama authorized the ‘surge’ -- adding some 30,000 troops and approving construction of another 8 new ‘temporary’ US bases in Afghanistan, bringing the total bases there to an astonishing 22, including the huge airbases at Bagram and Kandahar.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has refused to put a time limit on the duration of the US military presence in Afghanistan. That is not because of the Taliban, but clearly rather the long-term Washington strategy of spreading the ‘war on terror’ across all Central Asia including into the strategically vital Ferghana Valley bordering Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. This is where the latest events in Kyrgyzstan become geopolitically more than interesting for Russia, for China and for Washington.

On April 14, Gates told the press that he was confident the US would retain rights to use Manas for what the Pentagon calls its Northern Distribution Network, flying supplies into the Afghanistan war theatre.[20] Just days before, interim government figures in Bishkek had indicated US rights to Manas were high on the list to be cancelled.

During a meeting with Russia’s Medvedev, President Obama agreed that the Kyrgyz events were definitely not a Russian counter coup. He extended immediate US recognition of the Interim regime of Roza Otunbayeva.

The question at this point is what role Kyrgyzstan will play in the high drama geopolitical chess game for control of Central Asia, and with it, control of the Eurasian Heartland as British geopolitician Halford Mackinder termed it. The key major actors outside Kyrgyzstan in this geopolitical high-stakes chess game across Central Asia are China, Russia, and the United States. In the next part we examine the geopolitical interest of China regarding fellow Shanghai Cooperation Organization member Kyrgyzstan.

F. William Engdahl is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order

[4] RIA Novosti, Russia throws weight behind provisional Kyrgyz govt., April 8, 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/exsoviet/20100408/158480874.html. Well-informed former Indian Ambasador, K. Gajendra Singh in an article published in Russia’s RIA Novosti also states that Putin had spoken with Otunbayeva twice since the protests began on April 7 and that she had also visited Moscow in January and March of this year. (K. G. Singh, Geopolitical battle in Kyrgyzstan over US military Lilypond in central Asia, Ria Novosti, 13 April 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/valdai_foreign_media/20100413/158555369.html).

[16] Maria Golovnina and Dmitry Solovyov, Kyrgyzstan’s new leaders say they had help from Russia, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 8, 2010, accessed in http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/kyrgyzstans-new-leaders-say-they-had-help-from-russia/article1527239/

[18] BNO News, OSCE says Kyrgyzstan President Bakiyev’s departure is the result of joint efforts with Obama, Medvedev, April 15, 2010, accessed in http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world/osce-says-kyrgyzstan-president-bakiyevs-departure-is-the-result-of-joint-efforts-with-obama-medvedev_100348625.html

AbstractAlthough advanced parental age at one's birth has been associated with increased risk of breast and prostate cancers, few studies have examined its effect on adult-onset sporadic hematologic malignancies. The authors examined the association of parents' ages at women's births with risk of hematologic malignancies among 110,999 eligible women aged 22-84 years recruited into the prospective California Teachers Study. Between 1995 and 2007, 819 women without a family history of hematologic malignancies were diagnosed with incident lymphoma, leukemia (primarily acute myeloid leukemia), or multiple myeloma. Multivariable-adjusted Cox proportional hazards models provided estimates of relative risks and 95% confidence intervals. Paternal age was positively associated with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after adjustment for race and birth order (relative risk for age >/=40 vs. <25 years = 1.51, 95% confidence interval: 1.08, 2.13; P-trend = 0.01). Further adjustment for maternal age did not materially alter the association. By contrast, the elevated non-Hodgkin lymphoma risk associated with advanced maternal age (>/=40 years) became null when paternal age was included in the statistical model. No association was observed for acute myeloid leukemia or multiple myeloma. Advanced paternal age may play a role in non-Hodgkin lymphoma etiology. Potential etiologic mechanisms include de novo gene mutations, aberrant paternal gene imprinting, or telomere/telomerase biology.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Agenda 21 Sustainable Development is the overarching blueprint for depopulation and total control, using the environment as the excuse for that control. The 3 major tools that are used are :

• Global warming• Water Shortages• Endangered Species Act

In the case of the California Delta, man made water shortages have been imposed on farmers by way of the ESA (Endangered Species Act) for the last three years. Still, the Delta smelt populations have declined, despite the restrictions. While the federal government refused to acknowledge that the cause for the decline in smelt populations was due to up to 1 BILLION gallons of partially treated sewage being flushed into the Delta per day, they blamed the water pumps for the decline in smelt. Their disastrous solution was to cut the water flow to farmers (who supply our country with 50% of its produce and nuts), thereby increasing the water levels in the Delta to dilute pollution.

This didn't work, smelt populations declined. In fact, California had a wetter-than-usual winter and instead of allowing more water to be delivered to farms, when the Shasta Reservoir filled to its safe capacity level, the water was bled out into the Pacific Ocean. Due to mounting pressure against the corrupt Department of Interior and obvious waste of water, the federal pump's water delivery was increased in some areas. Many allege that this was also in part due to Central Valley Congressmen Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa voting in favor of Obamacare, in trade for water to the farm areas. Ironically, the farms were promised 25% of the amount of water that had been contracted (40% is what is needed to keep the farms viable). Further, the farmers were promised a delivery up to 25%, but they were only guaranteed a 5% increase, thereby making it difficult for them to get loans because the farmers, in turn, couldn't guarantee a harvest with only a 5% increase of water.

Last week, Patricia Gilbert, a professor of ecology and oceanography from the University of Maryland, concluded that the smelt decline was a result of high ammonium levels from urine and feces. Specifically, she cited that the pollution was coming primarily from Sacramento, which doesn't fully process its sewage before it is dumped into the Delta. Dr. Patricia Gilbert was then forced to resign from the National Academy of Sciences panel. The Academy forced her resignation because she went public with the information and they found it a conflict of interest for her to review her own work. This is incredibly hypocritical, given the profound conflicts of interest within the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Academy of Sciences is a quasi- governmental agency, created during Lincoln's administration. The Academy advises the government in scientific matters in order to set public policy and law. The NAS is also a tax exempt private corporation (they do not publish their financial records on their website, nor do they list their donors). NAS is subsidized by federal grants and other "contributions" from undisclosed donors. New members are elected by current members, thus ensuring cronyism, a depopulation agenda and fraud.

For example, some of the prestigious members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) include Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, Gene Likens and Frederick Bormann, and Mario J. Molina.

John Holdren (Obama's current science czar) and Paul Ehrlich are rabid eugenicists- supporters of selective breeding often through brutal means like genocide and forced sterilization, who co-authored 'Ecoscience', which advocates a "global police force" to enforce totalitarian measures of population control that includes forced abortions and mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, among other horrors. It is interesting to note that Ehrlich's work also appears in the United Nations Agenda 21 Global Biodiversity Assessment Report.

Gene Likens, along with Frederick Bormann, invented acid rain. In 1980, the NAS predicted acid rain would double the number of acid-dead lakes within 10 years, so a $600 million dollar study by the US government, that spanned 10 years, discredited Liken's theory. Dr. Ed Krug found that acidity in the Adirondack lakes was not caused by coal processing in Pennsylvania (as theorized by Likens), but by local plants and soil. Because of the enthusiasm of policy makers this scientific scandal was hidden until 60 Minutes got hold of it and it became widely publicized. After awhile, people forgot about Liken's and Bormann's science fraud and acid rain regulations were written into the federal Clean Air Act. The EPA trashed Dr. Ed Krug's career thereafter.(5)

Mario J. Molina, a professor at MIT, won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating alarmism over the ozone hole in the Antarctic, for which he blamed CFCs (chlorofluorocarbon gases from refrigerants and aerosol products like hairspray). Freon refrigerants were vilified as a major cause of the Arctic ozone depletion. It later came to light that ozone over the Arctic cyclically thins for a brief period of time, and there is no hole. However, corporate controlled policy makers rushed to ban freon because the DuPont patent was expiring on it, and DuPont would lose the monopoly because other companies could manufacture freon cheaply. DuPont did own a patent on an alternative product that was more expensive and more difficult to produce, so freon was banned..There is an obvious lack of easily accessible information about who funds the National Academy of Sciences in addition to the US federal government; clearly, the ruling elite monopoly owners have an overwhelming amount of 'influence'. There is evidence of financial ties to the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation, who are cohorts in depopulation of the planet, as evidenced by the support of Rockefeller's Population Council.

The lawsuit to save the California Delta smelt and to close down the water pumps, based on the corrupt Endangered Species Act, was brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, and is funded by the Ford Foundation (the annual budget is $87 million dollars). The California Delta smelt debacle is a model of how the globalists plan to create water shortages via the Endangered Species Act in order to pursue the objectives of Agenda 21 (depopulation and control). Therefore, science should be scrutinized.

Valid science is independent and does not have a political or economic agenda attached to it.Valid science considers ALL data, as opposed to ignoring that which does not fit in its paradigm.Valid science has reproducible results.Valid science freely provides information to the public without the necessity of the Freedom of Information Act.

The good news: Federal Judge Oliver Wanger ruled on 5/25/2010 that the biological opinion, provided by the National Marine Fisheries Services, a sub agency of the Department of Interior, failed to consider the impact that turning off the federal pump (owned by the Department of Interior) had on humans. Therefore, he allowed the pump to be reactivated at 40%- enough to irrigate farms, until June 15th and then the case will be revisited. It is important to remember that the Department of Interior also determines which species are 'endangered'.

While there are many good scientists out there, when public policy is concerned, or an economic agenda is at stake, we can see what happens to them as evidenced by Dr. Ed Krug and Dr. Patricia Gilbert. The NAS wanted to wait until Fall 2011 to issue their recommendation on the Delta issue, but now their advice is becoming irrelevant. In fact, this is a perfect model of how we can rid ourselves of tyranny. Because Dr. Patricia Gilbert took her results public, which clearly pointed the finger at the sewage issue, a condition that can be easily remedied, the Academy's scientific edict may no longer matter. We can win against environmental tyranny through exposure- it worked with 'Climategate', and it is unfolding in the Delta right now. Massive exposure of fraudulent science is an effective way to end Agenda 21; when respect for authority (of science) disappears, people stop following corrupt leaders.